The Blob, the Chunk, & the Block: Structured Content in the Age of Gutenberg

The Blob, the Chunk, & the Block: Structured Content in the Age of Gutenberg

Content Strategists like Karen McGrane make a distinction between CMS implementations that store content in large, unstructured “blobs” and those which store finely grained, structured “chunks.” WordPress is often accused of being on #teamblob but with appropriate use of custom post types, post meta, taxonomies, and term meta, can be an excellent example of #teamchunk.

Is this a return to #teamblob? If you create a block for, as an example, staff profiles, will you end up with hardcoded staff phone numbers in different blocks on different pages? Will you have to rewrite the staff directory to be a dynamic block? What’s all this about storing the content as html comments?

This talk will not be a deep dive into the code of Gutenberg, but will explain how Gutenberg’s approach fits into the debate about structured content versus unstructured content, and how you can best leverage the new WordPress editor without going all blobby.